Fronting: The syntax and pragmatics of 'focus' and 'topic'.

Abstract

We argue on conceptual and empirical grounds that there are no dedicated Topic and Focus heads. Instead, we postulate two semantically trivial heads, Gap and Φon, which may be merged in the left periphery, with distinct syntactic and morphological properties. Gap is a Case assigner; Φon morphologically selects for the PF-interpretable part of some sign. These heads can be exploited to front phrases which may be pragmatically interpreted as topic or focus. We further argue that the two fronting mechanisms postulated can explain certain properties of NPI licensing in English, where Copy Movement, with or without movement in the PF component, cannot. 1 Summary and outline In this paper, we intend to set out what we consider to be the most economical explanation of topic and focus. The idea is to sketch what we consider to be the proper distribution of explanations between syntax, pragmatics, and semantics. Throughout, we use ‘topic ’ for “what the clause is about”, and ‘focus ’ for that portion of the sentence which could plausibly provide the “new ” material in an answer to a question, or which supplies contrastive information. The informal vagueness of these characterisations is not a problem, as we will argue that there are no heads dedicated to ‘fronting ’ topic or focus. Rather, UG allows phrases to be fronted by either of two distinct mechanisms, each of which involves a licensing head. The two heads have minimal semantics but distinct syntactic properties. Each head may select for TP, and both occur in English. The first of them involves a head which is morphologically incomplete, and has to be associated with the PF part of some other head. For mnemonic We would like to thank Enoch Aboh for help with data. This paper is an expansion of one we gave to the Conference on the Interaction between Syntax and Pragmatics, and we would like to thank members of the audience for questions and discussion. Comments on this paper would be welcome. Email:

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